


come away with me

by mollivanders



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M, Gen, On the Run
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-19
Updated: 2012-11-19
Packaged: 2017-11-19 00:55:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/567219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollivanders/pseuds/mollivanders
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katniss is back a week when Gale disappears. </p><p>Just drops off the face of the earth – no note, no goodbye. She’d seen him once, across the way at The Hob, and though he’d raised a hand in acknowledgement of hers, he hadn’t stuck around.</p><p>(Turns out that was the big plan.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	come away with me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jada_jasmine](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=jada_jasmine).



> **Title: come away with me**  
>  Fandom: The Hunger Games  
> Rating: PG  
> Characters: Gale/Katniss  
> Author's Note: Word Count - 1,069. Written for the [teenager comment ficathon](http://fluffyfrolicker.livejournal.com/27132.html). Prompt was _come with me where we will never have to worry about grown up things again_. An AU take on the series with some canon events and timelines tweaked.  
>  Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Katniss is back a week when Gale disappears. 

Just drops off the face of the earth – no note, no goodbye. She’d seen him once, across the way at The Hob, and though he’d raised a hand in acknowledgement of hers, he hadn’t stuck around.

(Turns out that was the big plan.)

It’s not strange – not really – until she goes to visit the Hawthornes and finds them relatively serene for a family whose only breadwinner just disappeared.

“It’s alright, Katniss,” Rory tells her solemnly. “Gale said you’d look out for us.”

The truth in his words don’t take the sting away. “So he just left?” Katniss asks Rory, and though he nodded seriously, she notices the look on Vick and Posy’s faces more. “Uh huh,” Katniss says and stands to leave. “I’ll bring you guys something tomorrow, okay?” she says before hugging Gale’s mother goodbye.

(All of them, far too calm.)

And yes, Gale had always wanted to leave, but he’d never leave his siblings, so Katniss only feels her suspicions confirmed when Prim tells her that Posy wasn’t at school today. She runs all the way to Gale’s house to find the windows shuttered and the door locked, and when she bashes in the cheap lock she finds an empty house.

+

Whispers come to her, face of the Rebellion, about children going missing from other districts. Children on the brink of starvation, teenagers worked to the bone, parents gone in the dead of night, and Katniss knows; feels it in her bones.

(Feels Gale on the wind.)

The sting hasn’t lessened; that he left her behind. Haymitch and Peeta don’t believe it amounts to anything and point out she’s a victor; she needs to be on her guard. Gale couldn’t afford to take her anyway.

He waits for her, one hot day, at their old meeting place. She knows the length of his back and the crook of his upward gaze and her breath hitches in her throat.

“Gale,” she says, not quite believing it’s really him until he turns and his profile is caught by the sun. “Catnip,” he answers.

She is not sure how she gets there but the next moment she is in his arms, holding him as tightly as she can, her cheek buried against his chest.

“Hey,” he says, pulling away to look down at her. “You didn’t think I’d forget you, did you?”  
She cannot answer and so he sits with her on the rock, facing outward. “Thank you,” he says after a long silence. “For looking out for them.”

“It’s what we always said we’d do,” Katniss tells him, and though he wasn’t taken, though he wasn’t chosen, she knows that he might as well have been. Chosen for something else, perhaps.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you,” Gale says quietly and Katniss clasps his hand in hers. “I knew,” she murmurs.

The story spills out in bits, in pieces, but Gale has been setting up a network. It’s hard and dangerous and they’ve lost people here and there, but there’s a train of people from here to the border getting people out. There’s a bit of ocean, he tells her, where they’ve settled. Mountains rise up behind them and the hunting is good.

She doesn’t ask if he’ll take her. She asks for Prim.

“That’s why I came back,” he answers and Katniss swallows. “Haymitch says I can’t go,” she says. Gale looks at her, his steady gaze and knowing look unchanged, before he nods. “Not yet,” he says. “But we’ll get you too.”

When he closes the distance between them to kiss her, Katniss leans into him, her hand covering his against her face. A muffled note of surprise escapes her when his fingers graze her breast but when he pulls back she reaches for him again and this time, pushes him farther, parts his mouth and lets him settle over her. She is dizzy, she is restless, and she wants.

(She knows his body like it is her own.)

He breaks away from her, his chest rising and falling in rhythm with hers, and pulls her back up with him.

“Not yet,” he tells her and though the loss of him is magnified more than when he was actually gone, Katniss stands and offers him her hand as well. “Where should I bring Prim?” she asks.

Prim goes without tears on the condition that Katniss follow, as soon as she can. “Keep her safe,” she orders Gale and he nods without a word, disappears with Prim into the forest.

(She cries herself to sleep that night.)

+

A week passes and Katniss relaxes, decides that nothing has happened except for that Prim has escaped Panem and Gale is on his way home. She heads over to Haymitch’s with a cheer in her step and is completely unprepared for the footage playing on his screen.

Three dead. Two girls. One named Primrose Everdeen.

(She does not remember screaming, she does not remember clawing at Peeta and Haymitch, she does not remember being dosed and carried back to her mother and she does not remember the ride to District 13. She does not want to.)

When Katniss wakes, Gale is in the bed next to her, his eyes shut and his breathing steady.

She does not understand.

“Gale,” she says, her voice scratchy and throat sore. “Gale, wake up.” He stirs and when he sits up she sees his wounded eye, the scars on his wrist, the burn around his throat. 

“Gale,” she says, because there is nothing else to say. He looks straight at her, shuts his good eye, and lies back down.

+

After the war is won – after Katniss has lost everyone and everything else she loves – he comes to visit her in the hospital.

“So, Snow,” he says evenly and Katniss nods, sitting up and pulling her knees to her chest. Everything hurts but pain is relative; pain is a constant. It does not matter.

“They might put me on trial,” she says and Gale nods, sitting on the edge of her bed. “That so,” he muses. Something about his demeanor is off and she frowns, trying to figure it out. “You know,” he says, looking down, “I still know some people.”

(People who betrayed Gale. People who betrayed Prim. People she’d very much like to meet.)

They disappear into the woods outside the Capital together.

_Finis_


End file.
